Operation Nobel, part II

The prize committee issues Obama with a call to action

So, the weather didn't clear, but the mood in Oslo lifted distinctly yesterday evening: Barack Obama seems to have pulled off the remarkable trick of talking peace while standing firm to his commitments to war. And despite annoying the Norwegians at first by making his visit so peremptory -- "Everybody wants to visit the Peace Centre except Obama," snarked the newspaper Aftenposten -- he even seems to have warmed their hearts. He has done all this in less than a day. Living up to the prize will be nothing like as easy.

After his morning visit to the Nobel Peace Institute, Obama met with Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, who hardly needed the popularity boost, having just been re-elected, but who was doubtless grateful for it all the same. He set out a to-do list for the US president, beginning with a strong political agreement in Copenhagen.

That established one theme for the day: telling Obama how to do his job. At the press conference afterwards, a Norwegian journalist set the other: the search for justifications for his prize. What were the president's own views on it? Obama was asked. He replied by defusing the question with a one-liner: "The goal is not to win a popularity contest." That was the easy base covered, but the one American journalist then also granted a question went straight for the jugular: "Will the July 2011 date be when US troops actually withdraw [from Afghanistan]?" It would, Obama acknowledged, be just the beginning. He was doubtless relieved that the day's tight schedule would leave no time for follow-up questions.

The proddings and calls for justifications followed Obama over in the early afternoon to City Hall, where he was to give his Nobel Lecture, the prizewinner's address. Introducing Obama, the chairman of the Nobel Committee, Thorbjørn Jagland, gave his own, highly self-conscious defence of the committee's decision to award the prize to the US president, as well as a running commentary on the sort of world they would like to see him help create.

When Albert Luthuli received his prize in 1961, Obama was told, the struggle against apartheid was in its infancy; when Martin Luther King received his in 1964, the struggle for civil rights in America was also far from over. And as the committee has constantly been pointing out since making the award, Obama's prize, much more so than theirs, is intended to be "a call to action".

Some might, of course, say that all this is merely wishful thinking, and that their hopes of handing Obama a set of golden handcuffs at the same time as the Nobel gold medal are misplaced, misguided even. But as the words of Obama's own speech echoed literally right around the city this afternoon -- broadcast as they were from a large screen outside the City Hall -- he seemed to win a good few people to their cause.

In any case, "A Call to Action" is a phrase the Norwegians will keep hearing over the next year, it also being the title of the Obama exhibition that will run until December at the Nobel Peace Centre. Whether it is a phrase that still rings in the man's own ears in six months, let alone a year's time, remains to be seen.

With luck, he might still remember it next week at least, when he flies back this way to Copenhagen. But my guess is that he will not. After an afternoon spent tying himself in knots over the mirage of "just wars", and paying lip service -- however eloquent that lip service may have been -- to the much harder task of rebuilding the livelihoods of those in whose country he currently commands an army, it seems that Obama will not himself be making the shift from the probable to the possible any time soon.